iPhone Dispatch Blog

A lot of fuss is being made over IMAP support in Gmail. IMAP is a big improvement over POP, because it basically remembers the state of messages between computers (and the iPhone). So you can read your email sometimes over the iPhone, sometimes over your computer, and never have to worry about which email you read or replied to over each — they are in sync all the time.
But I have to say that using Gmail with IMAP is still a drag. It doesn’t group emails in threads, and it is too easy to throw an email away, as opposed to the preferred Gmail action of archiving email.
On the other hand, one of the mobile versions of Gmail is fast and easy to use, and looks brilliant over the iPhone. If you disagree, it may be because you are using the very stripped-down mobile versions of Gmail that is meant for lesser phones. I’m not exactly sure how you insure you are viewing the iPhone version of Gmail — the same URL will take you to a lesser version in your Mac browser. I assume they are now sniffing your device type and showing you the good one. You should see Archive, Delete and Search buttons (not links, buttons) at the bottom of the page.

Thanks for the encouragement, Brian. I will post more.
So now we’ve got British and German iPhone brothers! The larger the audience, the more will go on with the iPhone. Soon France, Italy, Canada and maybe even China will join in.
I’m already seeing some .uk and .de traffic to my iPhone games site. I’ll try to take some time this holiday to find some new and interesting stuff for the iPhone to report.

Steve Jobs announced today that there will, indeed, be 3rd-party apps sanctioned by Apple. An SDK for developers is planned for February. I think the developer community is going to be strong for the iPhone. Micro-killer apps will be created (apps that are killer apps for small groups of people with different needs) and it will spur on lots of sales. Apple may indeed come to dominate the mobile phone market in the end.

Apple just launched a huge directory of iPhone Web applications at http://www.apple.com/webapps/. I guess this makes all the other iPhone app directories obsolete. I’m glad to see that almost all of my iPhone Games are listed. I’ll have to dig in deeper to see what other apps Apple has unearthed.

“J” asked how you would sync your Google calendar to your iPhone. Well, one way would be to simply use Google Calendar directly with their iPhone interface. But, if you want your Google calendar events to show up in the native iPhone calendar app, then you simply need to subscribe to your Google calendar via your Mac’s iCal application. Do this by going into Google Calendar, managing your calendars, sharing them publicly, and then grabbing the iCal link in the Calendar Details page. Paste that into iCal. Then your iCal application will read from Google calendar, and your iPhone syncs with that.
Unfortunately, there is no way to reverse the process, so new items added via your iPhone will never make it to Google Calendar. And, don’t even ask me how to do this in Windows. No idea.